Edward Falaise Upward

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Edward Falaise Upward, British writer (born Sept. 9, 1903, Romford, Essex, Eng.—died Feb. 13, 2009, Pontefract, West Yorkshire, Eng.), was the last surviving member of a close circle of literary friends who helped shape English literature in the 1930s; several associates—notably novelist Christopher Isherwood and poets W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender—credited Upward as a key influence on their own development. Upward was educated at Repton College, where he met Isherwood, and Corpus Christi, Cambridge (B.A., 1924; M.A., 1925). While attending Cambridge together, Upward and Isherwood crafted a series of fantastic stories set in a fictional English village called Mortmere. The often outrageous tales were widely circulated in manuscript among the pair’s friends but were not published until The Mortmere Stories appeared in 1994. Upward worked as a schoolmaster from 1931 to 1962. Although his first novel, Journey to the Border, was published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf in 1938, Upward’s literary efforts were often eclipsed by his fierce leftist perspective (he had joined the Communist Party in 1932), and he did not publish again for many years. Upward’s later works include The Railway Accident and Other Stories (1969), a trilogy of autobiographical novels (In the Thirties [1962], The Rotten Elements [1969], and No Home but the Struggle [1977]) that were published jointly as The Spiral Ascent (1977), and A Renegade in Springtime (2003).